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Critical Thinking & Numeracy

18 March 2018

Colleges and universities will “soon begin to divide into two entities—the STEM fields and related practical subjects (i.e., business and economics), and the social sciences and humanities, which would start to shrivel under the weight of the degradations the left has inflicted over the last 40 years.” So writes Steven Hayward in ‘The Higher Ed Crack Up Begins’ to which a reader and correspondent draws our attention. The degradations to public education have been covered extensively in these pages over the years, and the anticipated ‘crack up’ described by Hayward is long overdue.

Our public institutions of higher learning already naturally divide their curricula into what I will call productive courses and today’s leftwing ideological “fever swamps”, consisting mostly of the ‘xx studies departments’ – you know the ones I’m talking about. Carrying out this kind of divisions over the land will not be easy, and there are plenty of opportunities to unintentionally cut off some desirable meat with the proverbial fat. Hayward points to some things that must be carefully considered in doing this surgery.

If we want to view this restructuring from a more encompassing perspective, we inevitably encounter and must answer the question, ‘What is the function of education within a defined society?’ The answer quickly begins forming around the society’s attempt to achieve two prime objectives – survival and enhancing the quality of life. To survive, a society must successfully pass on to future generations the culture that defines it and makes it unique – among such cultural attributes are its language, history, values, mores, traditions, religions, …; essentially their commonly held ontology.

To provide the economic basis for enhancing a society members’ quality of life, it must also pass on needed skill sets, functioning infrastructure, and the means by which wealth can be created and accrued. We are, of course, clear on the mutual support that achieving these two objectives provide each other.

The members of societies long ago realized that some of the educational efforts required to achieve these things necessitate collective action – pooling their private resources to work together in an organized manner. This immediately called for the formation of collective institutions to carry out needed functions – among these are the military, emergency responders (e.g. law enforcement, fire, medical), and, of course, education. But why education?

15 March 2018

Yesterday was the day kids across the country were organized to walk out of their classes and protest ‘gun violence’. Given what the little darlins are (not) taught in schools, they appeared to have no idea of what had happened in Parkland and what they were actually protesting with signs like ‘Choose me, not guns!’ They were simply pawns in the most recent progressives’ plan not to waste another tragedy to advance their agenda. One of my favorite political observers put it this way –

If the kids doing the demonstrating/walking out were protesting massive failure at EVERY level of government and were protesting the dereliction of duty by the adults in their school, community, state, and federal government who are sworn to protect them and didn’t – great. Call attention to the fact that every single warning sign was ignored, pushed under the rug. Call attention to the fact that there was cowardice and incompetence. Call attention to the school which failed to refer the shooter to the police, call attention to the social workers who didn’t do anything, call attention to the sheriff and to the FBI who didn’t do anything.

I am suspicious that the kids’ desire to be kept safe from harm was and has been hijacked by political activists for THEIR intent to disarm American citizens. The response of the MSD HS students and elsewhere has been professionalized. When entities like the Miami Herald, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Women’s March, Michael Bloomberg, MoveOn.org, Planned Parenthood, and the Broward County American Federation of Teachers all provide instant organizing assistance, buses, money (from celebrities too), publicity… you know the kids didn’t do it alone.

The president of the AFT told BuzzFeed that they are also behind the national school walkout. Now that is inappropriate. That is using children.

I would add that had the kids not been professionally goaded, they may not have done anything of this nature or coordinated on a national scale. Their reason-restricted and one-sided protest against the access and ownership of guns is prima facie evidence of their having once more been marshalled as the Left’s “useful idiots”.

The Left’s alarming increase in the use of ‘action’ instead of reason to advance their cause highlights their lack of the latter to support their arguments. Agreeing with this observation we now have the voice of Michael Walzer, the long-heralded dean of the American Left and 30+ year editor of the leftwing magazine Dissent. In his just published book Foreign Policy for the Left (2018), Mr Walzer explains why the Left has substituted action (e.g. the managed student demonstrations) for reason in their apologetics. As a champion of the Left, Walzer has been a longtime proponent of the moral argument for collectivism. “He believes, a priori, in practicing human decency: a moral sensibility toward other people and their existences. He thinks that capitalism’s inequality has coarsened this sensibility but that capital’s productive capacity can be harnessed, through political action, to transcend the capitalist system: to create societies where people can live more equally and so be more decent to one another.”

Walzer sees the danger in the Left’s “vanguardism, under which acolytes of an ideal believe that the ideal is more important than how they reach it.” – in short, the end does justify any available means. We see that every day, especially in the Left’s rabid efforts to ruin Trump’s presidency, and in their longer term opposition to anything American as a force for good in the world. Walzer advises the Left adopt a “politics of sympathy and distinction”, but concludes his anguished analysis with a fear that today America’s Left is too far gone in their ingrained practice of public “indecency”.

Martin Peretz, the former editor of the leftwing New Republic, reviews Walzer’s book (here) and asks "can there be a 'decent' Left?". He adds his own “explanation of the Left’s indecency” that originated with the teachings of Herbert Marcuse, “the intellectual influence behind the New Left of the 1960s”, who “urged his followers to practice varieties of extreme experience”. Echoing Marcuse, today’s leftists claim that reason “is a scrim for forces that want to oppress (the people) - their identities, their economic interests, their self-regard. So words no longer matter, only actions.” That is their “explanation for why other viewpoints are not worthy of attention”. We have seen a profusion of such sentiment expressed in these pages.

09 March 2018

People want to have their soul in the game. In that sense, decentralization and fragmentation, aside form stabilizing the system, improves people's connection to their labor. N. Taleb

George Rebane

‘Trump’s Hoover Temptation’ appears to be real and, to me, scary. The only thing that would keep the world from spiraling into another Smoot-Hawley abyss is that today countries have many ad hoc trade relationships with each other such as the new TPP from which the US withdrew. But we’re still the economic gorilla on this planet, so it’s hard to tell what will really happen. My own hope is that Trump has the guts to replace Gary Cohn with some equivalent anti-tariff voices like Kudlow, Laffer, or Graham. The Dems, of course, are cheering on Trump’s tariffs, hoping that they will cause enough economic chaos to dent the GOP’s chances in November. For today's Dems it's always party above country.

05 March 2018

If you cannot see the irony in having a gun ban enforced by men with guns, then you fail to understand why the Second Amendment was written in the first place.

George Rebane

The NYT publishes another exhibit of yellow journalism with an article (here) that leaves the naïve reader convinced that ‘assault rifles’, like the Parkland massacre kind, fire special bullets that cause “ghastly” wounds not experienced with normal hunting rifles. They show X-rays of 223 bullets smashing bones and quote surgeons unfamiliar with war wounds being astounded by what a high velocity bullet does to meat and bone. The truth of the matter is that regular civilian hunting rifles at calibers above 223 (5.56mm) firing higher velocity, more massive, soft-nosed bullets (banned in warfare) do much more damage than the AR-15 civilian versions firing the standard full metal jacketed bullets. All this is lost in the NYT article, the main purpose of which is to promote the removal of AR-15 style rifles from civilian hands. The reader unfamiliar with firearms is totally bamboozled by this latest dose of bullcrap from the now totally propagandized Gray Lady.

Respected ecologist Robert May (The Perfect Bet, 2018) showed that tightly connected, large complex systems are not stable. (That’s why they don’t exist in nature.) His corollary was that the larger the ecoosyctem, the less stable it is. Question – can anyone connect the dots for what this says about a centrally planned, comprehensively administered, large socio-economic system? While always welcome, progressives may be excused from participating in this little exercise.

Over the years RR commenters have divided themselves into two more or less distinct groups with how they support their debate arguments. There are those who cite sources that present data which can be factually checked, and those who present sources that contain nothing more than restatements of their own fact-free allegations, thereby claiming that two sources of identical allegations are all that’s needed to confirm the verity alleged. For the former, I draw your attention to commenters who cite colleges that now include leftwing propaganda subjects in their STEM curricula in support of the thesis that our institutions of higher education have been compromised along many dimensions of pedagogy. These citations appeared in the recent Sandbox and repeated here and here.

Trump’s tariffs are an economic policy screw-up. I know I’ve said this before, but it really irks me that he is now materially denting his presidency beyond whatever sins he has committed in his Twitter account. Team Trump should know better than most, that you get less of whatever you tax more. Higher taxes have never increased the supply of anything, and here Trump is attempting to increase America’s supply of jobs. No one in his administration can explain why seeking to guarantee (not increase) the existence of 140,000 metals sector jobs will not jeopardize and reduce some of the 6.5M collateral jobs that depend on the current low prices of metals available to American manufacturers. The bottom line here is that Trump’s tariffs will not bring more jobs to the steel and aluminum industries which are going balls out to automate and make better quality, cheaper metals at higher volumes. An example of all this is seen in how a small steel mill in Austria (that global steel producing powerhouse) is able to stay competitive. Hasn’t anyone in the WH studied comparative advantage, after all, they’re supposed to be Republican capitalists? (more here)

Our George Boardman writes in the 5mar18 Union on gun control (here), and properly argues that existing gun laws should be enforced before we go willy-nilly into making another batch that ratchet us toward gun confiscation. But then he can’t let well enough alone, and goes off the rails with a proposal to jail the victims of theft when their guns are stolen and subsequently used in crimes (which he correctly points out is the prime source of criminals’ guns). Imagine if we took the Boardman Principle and applied it to automobiles, prescription medicines, household chemicals, plastic bags, sharp cutlery and tools, and who knows what else that could be stolen and criminally used. In America storing something in one’s house (the owner’s vaunted ‘castle’ according to English common law) should be sacrosanct on its face, no matter how it is therein secured. Your house is already supposed to be a secure facility against thievery and robbery; we establish and support local constabularies to make it so, and their failure to accomplish this should not be cause to also criminalize the victim. Government’s reach into the home to dictate further how things in there should be disposed has already put us on a slippery slope on the return road to serfdom. Mr Boardman seeks to don the mantle of reason with his helpful nostrums to surreptitiously decrease our rights to property ownership. The Left has never accepted that you own something only to the degree that you can dispose of it as you will.

[8mar18 update] NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten reports on another big government screw-up that is kicking our private parts from over 50 years ago. In his 'The Curious History of Chain Migration' he takes us on a short trip on memory lane to illustrate "a classic case of unintended consequences".

28 February 2018

We have covered a lot of left/right asymmetric reporting on RR. Calling such journalism ‘asymmetric’ perhaps substitutes a kinder word for what today has come to be called ‘fake news’. One area that has institutionalized fake news is the way our lamestream media report the ‘science’ of climate change. Starting with the leftwing leading lights like the New York Times, we are now getting reports from former reporters for the Gray Lady that the topics it covers has to support what is internally called ‘the narrative’. All reporters are automatically tuned in to that editorial invisible hand, for which they then create the conforming copy to sustain the narrative.

The most recent, from the legion of examples, involves research by climate physicists Peter Cox, Mark Williamson, and Chris Huntington of Exeter University and the UK Center for Ecology and Hydrology. Their work first and foremost admits to the uncertainties involved in predicting climate parameters such as temperature, but also significantly narrows the range of predicted temperature increase, most noticeably removing the possibility of the upper hysterical values of +4.5C and above from consideration and making increases greater than +3.4C highly improbable. Their report has been buried by the lamestream climate science reporters. WSJ’s Holman Jenkins reports more on this here.

The Cox et al study again confirms that the best kept secret about climate science is that this domain of knowledge has not progressed very much – “This 40-year lack of progress is no less embarrassing for being thoroughly unreported in the mainstream press.” A litmus test for advancing science in any domain is that its continuously refined theoretical models generate results with ever smaller uncertainty bounds. This has not happened for general circulation models used for long-range climate forecasting. One reason is that the GCMs incorporate various specific climate and weather processes, most of which are poorly understood and therefore continue contributing to the error of the overall outputs.

As I have reported for years, the earth’s CO2 cycle remains, as confirmed in a recent commentary in the prestigious Nature, “an intractable problem”. For example, no one can answer the basic question “By how much will Earth’s average surface temperature go up if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is doubled?” All we know is that the GCMs have gotten it wrong using historical data. And no one in the lamestream mentions this because it doesn’t fit their narrative, which is to support ‘fundamentally transformative’ changes not only in public policies but also in the fundamental forms and structures of governance. (I again refer you to Agenda21.)

But the skewed ideas about climate change is just one of many areas where the lamestream and their blindered consumers dispense a constant stream of errors and lies. The stats on the political leanings of the nation’s broadcast, print, and online newsrooms has been extremely well documented in multiple studies. And the claim that no matter a journalist’s personal ideology, their professional work product comes out fair and balanced. Nobelist Kahneman and Tversky (q.v.) gave lie to this bullshit decades ago, and it is regularly reinforced by academics and students of decision-making like in Annie Duke’s recent Thinking in Bets (2018). The bottom line here is that confirmation bias is and has been endemic in humans. In simpler times this kind of thinking had a survival value; in more complex times it also leads to narrative-directed reporting.

One can reasonably argue that the impact of this asymmetry affects leftwingers much more than those of the Right. The leftist reader’s confirmation bias is continuously supported by the lamestream, and a negligible fraction of these bother to find out what appears in the more conservative outlets (this is also confirmed by the displayed one-sided knowledge of RR’s leftwing commenters). The rightwing readers have no choice but to be bathed in lamestream reporting because of its sheer preponderance. These readers must go to relatively few outlets that have a different and usually more complete slant on what is going on. Why more complete? Because they also have to report on the output that forms the overwhelming coverage to which their own news consumers have been exposed. The lamestream’s coverage clearly indicates that they have no such concerns about their audiences.

We conclude this observation with yet another current omission in the lamestream media about school shootings and gun control that does not fit the obligatory narrative. I refer you to the study by Dr James Alan Fox, professor of criminology, law, and public policy at Northeastern University. The study contradicts that school shootings are on the rise, and one of its main findings is that “the number of students killed in schools today is one-fourth what it was in the early 1990s – a somewhat surprising fact given the 24/7 media hysteria surrounding atrocities like Parkland.” (more here) In short, there is not an epidemic of school shootings when compared to historical data. Now how many liberals would run across a report like that?

27 February 2018

‘Remember, the government cannot give anything to anyone that they have not first taken away from someone else.’ Anonymous

George Rebane

The Democratic Party’s sharp move to the left during the last ten years is now visible to all save only the most politically myopic among us. Daily dunnings of fellow Democrats (especially in California) for not being sufficiently progressive or socialistic are now common. The dismal dumbth of Millennials has given impetus to the Left’s elites to strike now before life’s experiences start creating doubts in those numbed minds. This ideological migration has caused the so-called middle to also move leftward. (more here)

California has already started implementing the Great Divide as our vanguard proto-socialist 'nation' that today exercises its newfound sovereignty by choosing which federal laws to follow. According to the one-party legislature in Sacramento, there are more initiatives on the way to maintain the state’s headlong rush into collectivism. It is has been clear for years that in Sacramento, the interests of Republicans and conservatives in general have not been represented, and today are being actively rolled back as fast as the state's bureaucracies can act.

Echoing RR, William McGurn in the 27feb18 WSJ writes in ‘Our Childish Gun Debate’ – “… the public debate about how Congress ought to respond to this latest mass shooting is guided by two broad principles. Dubious on their own, they are even more witless when combined. The first is the idea that the most important thing is to 'do something'. The second is that we ought to look to high-schoolers for the answer.”

Hillary and Barack are fawning acolytes of Saul Alinsky, the communist who is finally recognized as the father of America’s political schism that has now morphed into the country writhing with tectonic tenets like the Great Divide.

On the tenth anniversary of W.F. Buckley’s death (27 February 2008), we remember that he “wanted American institutions to affirm capitalism on the grounds that it created more wealth and higher civilization than any alternative. He wanted them to acknowledge that not all cultures were equal and that the Judeo-Christian creed was superior because it recognized that man was created in the image of God. That premise, he held, was the source of all liberty, justice and law.” (more here)

[update] Snowstorm of the century or not is expected to start tomorrow night. The meleagris manning our weather guessing agencies are all over the map. As opposed to forecasting 2-4 ft of snow at 3,000 ft, we have others guessing that it will be only rain and slush. I guess diversity has struck the meteorological industry, today you can select the forecast most commensurate with your needs. I’m worried about how all this diversity will affect people’s decisions to attend Friday night’s MIM Amaral Center concert at the fairgrounds featuring the Sacramento Philharmonic (more here).

Speaking of weather predictions that feature probabilities from 0% to 100%, all of them effectively insane (in the technical sense) and changing daily, RR is willing to hold a seminar for the more mindful meleagris currently engaged in such futile pursuits - they know not what they know not. During the seminar we will cover the correct way to analyze and report probabilistic events yet to emerge from complex stochastic processes. As a sidebar and to inject some levity into an otherwise technically intense presentation, we will also discuss the hubristic aspects of general circulation models as used to predict water levels and temperatures a century from now.

Festung Academe - governors are planning to fortify their states’ schools with barbed wire, metal detector entry points, steel doors, bullet-proof glass, and armed sworn LE officers, but all of these worthies are against any trained teachers and staff with CCWs. That is supposed to send a wrong message to kids who will also be encouraged to show up in Kevlar vests and helmets. Even Florida governor and Republican Rick Scott has had a generous draught of that Kool-Aid.

The nation’s critical thinkers have concluded that the NRA was responsible for Parkland and all the other school shootings. In the next phase of the nation’s schism companies will declare themselves either conservative or liberal by their silence or vociferous opposition to and severing ties with the NRA. It seems that the fault really lies with all of us millions of NRA members who need an extra layer of public punishment, such as Delta’s decision to discontinue giving NRA members discounted fares they also give to many other affinity groups and organization members. I’m not sure that these businesses want to jump into politics with both feet.

[1mar18 update] Gag orders. Are there any legal mavens around here who could explain to us the origin of gag orders and their legal basis for suppressing the First Amendment rights of people who have not been convicted of anything, and whose subsequent speech would not affect national security. I can't find any support for gag orders in the US Constitution; where is it hiding?

[3mar18 update] How do we evaluate the wisdom of California’s public opinion polls on new public policies given that almost 40% of the state’s residents depend on a government check to maintain their quality of life? I throw this out as another point of discussion in light of the last such enquiry (above) to our RR readership having gone over like a turd in the punchbowl. I guess circling familiar barns is a lot more fun.

25 February 2018

Well, there is a difference or two between the Nunes (here)and the Schiff (here) memos. The main difference is the approach to disclose. Nunes stated material facts of what was and was not in the FISA application – it was not comprehensive for a number of reasons that included it being a purposely sanitized version that precluded the FBI and DOJ objecting to it on legal grounds of releasing classified information to the public. The Schiff memo was politically drafted to make it so that its release had to be delayed for national political gain that all turned out to be bullshit. Proof of that is seen in the memo itself which was submitted to the DOJ and FBIl (as was the Nunes memo) who returned it full of redactions.

(The memos issue has also been extensively discussed in these pages here and here.)

Schiff’s responses can be seen in this point by point compare/contrast piece in the WSJ (here), and they mainly consisted of ‘No it wasn’t’, ‘Yes, it was’, ‘there was also other good stuff in the application’, ‘the court knew the Dems paid for the dossier’, …, but no material facts that would support their rebuts.

The Democrats will all now vow that Schiff has completely destroyed the Republicans’ indictment of the Obama DoJ and FBI behaving badly in getting and renewing permission to spy on Americans. The rest with critical thinking skills will see Schiff’s response as the successful smokescreen it is for a neurologically more diverse audience. The whole dueling memo issue again comes down to declassifying and releasing the original DoJ and FBI applications so everyone can see what was the actual basis for the request to surveil.

Don’t hold your breath that people in those two agencies will ever be investigated by Mueller, let alone be indicted for the rampant corruption and incompetence that was evident then and has since seen even more light of day.

23 February 2018

RR has always taken the position that keeping certain facilities (public and private) as ‘gun free zones’ has been and continues to be a terribly misguided policy. There are millions of CCW permit holders in America who regularly carry, and keeping these folks out of ‘gun free zones’ has demonstrated that the only ones who then do take guns into such facilities are criminals, terrorists, the mentally disturbed, …, and occasionally LE officials when called.

After the recent Parkland, Florida massacre the gun control debate has now expanded to doing something real to prevent and/or mitigate such future massacres by arming selected school staffers with concealed carry firearms. President Trump has now indicated his backing for this sane policy which is already quietly practiced in multiple school districts across the land. Giving credit where due, NPR this morning broadcast an interview with a Texas school superintendent about schools in his district which have practiced an armed staff policy for some time with the full support of parents and voters. (The liberal interviewer did do his best to ask a couple of gotcha questions to which the superintendent had no problem supplying civil and utterly reasonable answers.)

22 February 2018

RR readers are familiar with the Rebane Doctrine maxim – ‘If something has gone wrong in society, government is guilty until proven innocent’. The verity of this has been demonstrated countless times in any and every country, especially in America. As our government has become the bloated leviathan that it is, the examples of major harm done by and through government tentacles (i.e. its bureaus, agencies, departments, commissions, …) to its citizens have literally grown without bound. A recent and timely compilation that includes current events and government activities is presented by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and WSJ Deputy Editorial Page Director Daniel Henninger, whose thesis is that “the list of fatal mistakes by federal agencies in recent years is staggering.”

After some toe-curling examples, Mr Henninger asks – “Why do these public-agency mistakes continue to happen? The reasons are complex, so an appeal to Occam’s Razor is in order. The simple answer is that the federal government has become too big to succeed. Its vastness ensures mistakes, and its public-safety responsibilities ensure that some of those mistakes will be fatal.” (more here)

And the growth is fueled by our citizens' carefully taught myopia about big government as the source of all of society’s blessings. The only ones celebrating the federal bloat are our calcified collectivist elites and their reliably history-challenged constituents. Today when anything goes wrong that passeth understanding, our carefully taught and hard-wired response is to face Washington and demand, “Do something!’

Going through Henninger’s list of federal travesties should convince any reasonable person of the ongoing dangers to fundamental public safety that government presents. In these pages, we understand that it’s difficult/impossible to centrally control a complex system whose behavior you don’t understand (i.e. whose transfer function that joins inputs and outputs is unknown and unknowable). Henninger concludes his commentary with –

It’s pertinent to ask, though, whether the federal government’s inexorable bloat has made it a clear and present danger to the American people. That’s a question for public safety. It’s also a question for our politics.

19 February 2018

“Over the last fifty years, it’s the Left that has assaulted every moral norm and disdained every religious and cultural restraint.” Andrew Klavan

George Rebane

Student groups across the land are now forming to protest the ownership and availability of guns in America. Their tearful yet uninformed emotions will supply more grist for grinding down the Second Amendment in the name of ‘saving the children’. I don’t want to re-circle the barn on all the arguments that correctly point out that no new gun control law suggested by the Left would have prevented the Parkland massacre.

I gave my views on a reasonable approach to preventing such shootings in ‘Stopping School Shooters’. We know it works because it is successfully applied in Israel and at the schools to which the elites send their kids. However, the peasant children can serve a far more useful role for the elites as pawns – to sacrifice in their schools, or parade for the press where they can influence the country’s neurochallenged, a new term to join ‘neurodiverse’, ‘neurotypical’, ‘neurodivergent’ … introduced by leftwing academicians (more here).

The only thing that I’ve heard which merits discussion and possible immediate implementation are the so-called Red Flag laws. Five states have these which allow a family member, who is almost always aware of a developing situation, to alert authorities who can then temporarily but immediately remove access to guns by the disturbed individual. The removal of the guns is not permanent, and their return depends on how the case is subsequently diagnosed and adjudicated. Bottom line, it is those close to the individual who can nip a developing situation in the bud, and thereby prevent a suicide or a tragic shooting like in Parkland.

17 February 2018

“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”John Stuart Mill

George Rebane

This is the title of a recent major essay by Dr Amy Wax that initially appeared (here) in the January 2018 issue of the Imprimis, and was also featured in the 17feb18 issue of WSJ. I bring it to our attention because it asks and answers a question of great moment in today’s America, and it also totally reflects the Rebane Doctrine that I have promoted for years in these pages. Her vitae abstract reads –

Amy L. Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she has received the Harvey Levin Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence. She has a B.S. from Yale College, an M.D. from Harvard Medical School, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. She is a former assistant to the United States Solicitor General, and her most recent book is Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century.

Dr Wax sets the stage with – “Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries.”

12 February 2018

Today we celebrate the closing of the National Hotel’s escrow. Owner Tom Coleman is a longtime Rebane family friend and poker buddy (developer of the notorious Coleman Shuffle, the Coleman Deal, and, of course, the ever-reliable Coleman Dollar bet). Tom called yesterday to tell me to get my butt down to the hotel for a last chance to haul some libations out of his inventory. Saturday night along with another couple of Tom’s friends, we spent an evening with him and his son (up here to help dad close up) in the Hoover Restaurant & Bar’s dining room toasting the old place, and being regaled with stories about the fabled hotel which Tom has owned now going on 40 years. Jo Ann and I wish Tom and Ernie the best of a retirement that has been too long in coming. Nevertheless, I promise to continue doing my best to assault Tom’s wallet during our longstanding monthly poker parties.

As I write, the Dow is up 2.22% (537 points) on its rocky recovery from attempting to scale an unsustainable super-exponential growth pattern. As Dr Didier Sornette of the ETHZürich has taught us, super-exponentials attempt to grow to infinity in a finite time. Our universe does not support those kinds of enterprises, and promises each such attempt a bruising correction. In the current correction I again smile at the naifs reporting on the markets – ‘Investors were bailing out of stocks today due to … .’ No they weren’t. Who the hell do you think was then doing the buying, the tooth fairy? For interested readers on why and when markets crash, I recommend perusing the good professor’s writings and the Financial Crisis Observatory website. And as you study today’s market charts, always remember – buy low, sell high.

The DC investigations memo wars are at a high fever pitch. RR readers from all sides of the political landscape have a fascinating weeks-long debate going (with citations galore) about what all the memos portend about Trump’s political future and this year’s midterm elections. (See comment streams here, here, and here.) Predictably the two major sides are trading ripostes from their separate universes which apparently have very few points of connection, most certainly not in what the facts are nor how we arrived at the current locations in our respective universes. By any measure, this dialogue (multi-logue?) is the most unprofitable exchange of words that the country has experienced in living memory, perhaps ever.

[14feb18 update] It now turns out that what all of us have been reporting about the Schiff memo was absolutely true – Adam Schiff and Pelosi lied when they claimed that President Trump gratuitously refused to declassify their rebuttal to the Nunes memo. It turns out that the lying SOSs purposely inserted sources and methods into their memo so it could not be released, and they could claim on national media that Trump was playing a political cover-up to his own wrongdoings in the memo wars. All lies, and lies that count.

And it turns out that what I reported as the dictionary's and RR’s definitions of ‘collusion’ also turn out to be correct. Collusion does not automatically mean a conspiracy to do something illegal, as the lamestream and the lesser lights have been hyper-ventilating about lately. From the horse’s mouth (or is it the other end?) we have that, “(Congressman Schiff) also somewhat backtracked on the Trump-Russia collusion issue, saying the Democrats’ definition of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia was much lower than potential criminal acts being reviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller. Collusion is not a crime under the federal statutes.” (more here)

[15feb18 update] Obama’s economic adviser speaks with forked tongue (here). We all know how the Left denigrates stock market performance and puu-puuhs its economic effect on anyone who is not in their currently designated wealthy class. But suddenly when it serves their narrative or can be used to excuse past poor professional performance, then suddenly the lower and middle classes become shareholders whose economic behavior is immediately stimulated by the “wealth effect” of a rising stock market. This is how Harvard biz school professor Jason Furman attributes the cause of last year’s breakout GDP growth – it was demand driven by the broad population of consumers who mysteriously became the beneficiaries of their appreciating, but heretofore non-existent, portfolios and went on a buying splurge. This is the same professor who was Obama’s chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (2013-17), and one of the prime architects of the historically post-recession stagnant growth we enjoyed during his time in government. Wonder what he’s now teaching the next crop of MBAs - oh yes, it's "hoping for 3% or more (annual growth) is folly. The fundamentals—people and productivity—seem unlikely to provide it."

08 February 2018

The perennial healthcare debate didn’t get any more clear with the latest release of US life expectancy data by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the British Medical Journal. Our life expectancy is 1.5 years lower than the average in OECD countries, and it decreased by another 0.1 year to 78.6 in the most recent (2016) calculation. The single-payer (nationalized healthcare) advocates always jump to this stat to argue that we should adopt the highly propagandized and unsustainable socialized system like Canada’s or the British National Healthcare Service. But such simple thinking behind single-payer neither discovers the causal factors of longevity, nor points to a workable reform of our healthcare system.

As cited in the BMJ and by the CDC, the US death rate, hence life expectancy, is almost completely determined by our wealth and culture, and not by how healthcare is delivered and consumed in America. We have the money and the cultural support to continue killing ourselves early with everything from illegal drugs, prescribed opioids, horrible diets, sedentary lifestyles, growing suicide rates (mostly among rural whites), …, in short, activities that less wealthy and more traditional populations don’t value or have the time, wherewithal, or interest to raise to lethal levels. (more here)

But all that makes no never mind to our central planners for whom nationalizing healthcare is just one of many steps they prescribe to fundamentally transform America into a second world country in which government is the gentle giant and end-all in people’s lives. The issue recently rose to prominence when President Trump called the British NHS “broke and not working” (here) This accurate assessment, of course, caused the usual anti-Trump uproar, especially from British politicians who have been unsuccessfully wrestling with attempting to make the NHS work for several decades. Today the system’s shortages in physicians, hospital beds, and diagnostic facilities (e.g. CT scanners) is critical as reported in the British press (here and here). NHS waiting times have always been long, both for scheduled treatment and daily in the waiting rooms (often exceeding 12 hours). Recently these have “spiked” even higher, driving ever more people to seek private healthcare services both in and out of country.

The problem with the NHS and ALL other nationalized healthcare systems is lack of sustainability. Their costs are constantly overrunning the nationally budgeted funding levels which also increase year-over-year. But more importantly, the healthcare budgets are commanding ever greater percentages of the countries' GDPs and government budgets – the litmus tests of unsustainable enterprises. The socialists' only answer to all such undertakings diving for the mud is that ‘well, it ain’t crashed yet’. And while the rush to collapse continues, the daily solution to the problems entails ever more rationing, and simply doing without (which is also what lengthening waiting times constructively do).

In the US and elsewhere, none of this information must be allowed to concern our already neurodiverse fellow citizens. ‘Neurodiverse’, ‘neurotypical’, ‘neurodivergent’, … ?? We’ll soon be hearing more about these new ways to look at and describe our neighbors and co-workers, whether we like it or not. Stay tuned.

03 February 2018

Capitalism's cancer is corporatism, when corporations grow so large that they need government to stifle their competition and in the process kill capitalism.

As we witness the massive lamestream and Democrat pushback on the Nunes memo (more here, here, and here), thoughts turn to how Deep State has survived and thrived over the years and how it operates – specifically how it defends itself and deflects the occasional foray against it such as is currently being attempted. A little reflection reveals that the Deep State has baked in some pretty impressive and longstanding defenses; I would even argue that they are natural defenses in the sense of being intrinsic to such an institution.

The case for Deep State’s (DS’s) natural defenses can be summarized in the following points –

The DS is necessarily political. To believe that its cadre hew to some ideological middle is beyond naïve. As a minimum, DS always seeks to endear itself to the political faction which provides its current succor and assures its longest survival. This DS attribute is now organic in our penultimately polarized republic.

DS as a hierarchically structured bureaucracy is also intrinsically survivalist regardless of its ideological cast or that of its political sponsors. This is a well-known and documented aspect of all bureaucracies going back to biblical times.

The career staff manning the various DS units has been and continues to be politically biased. In the lower levels its workers know that their job security depends on pleasing their department bosses and minimally, if at all, on how they satisfy their ‘client’ needs. They also know that they will not be able to command their current benefits if forced to seek employment in the private sector. For lower level staffs having government employment on your resume puts you at a distinct disadvantage. Therefore, these workers are fiercely loyal to forces and initiatives that promulgate large government.

An extremely powerful natural ally of DS is the practice and growth of corporatism – the state of private/public sector collusion wherein government and corporations benefit each other through trading market protections (against competition foreign and domestic) for campaign contributions, direct ‘bag money’, and lucrative post-public service employment. Corporatism serves both the elected and the higher echelons of the DS.

The DS is always prepared and extremely compliant to being weaponized by their political favorites to launch attacks against designated political, commercial, and private citizen cohort targets. This is more so when the DS units are directed against targets they perceive as being inimical to their survival if the power balances should shift.

Natural political allies of the DS are parties and movements that promote the versions of collectivist governance, since for those ideologies the growth of government and its bureaucracies is endemic, being marbled in their social values and various objectives leading to the eventual fundamental transformation of America.

01 February 2018

President Trump’s State of the Union speech highlighted the roots of congressional dysfunction and confirmed that we are more polarized than ever in choosing our country’s future. The Democrats in the audience, in their multiple counter-speeches, and subsequently in the media have demonstrated that they have no intention of either celebrating benefits enjoyed by their constituencies or working with the Republicans to extend such benefits to broader cohorts of Americans.

Their focus is twofold – 1) maintain the belief that the formerly aggrieved classes are still aggrieved, and 2) retake Congress in November. And if this requires putting the Alinsky political protocols on steroids, so be it – lie at every turn, and loudly accuse the other side of having committed your own iniquities. As examples we see the Left’s leadership chorus broadcast to one and all that 2017 was the worst year in decades for Americans, and that 86 million of us will now pay higher taxes than before while all the benefits go to corporations and the rich who will do nothing with their ill-gotten gains to help America’s middle and poorer families. In short, as tens of millions of us are keeping more of our earnings, as our employers are giving us raises and bonuses, corporations are bringing back overseas stashes of cash, businesses are building new facilities and creating new jobs by the tens of thousands, … all of this is denied by the Left who tell our uninformed neighbors that exactly the opposite is happening under Trump.

That we are polarized is now accepted even by the elites of the Left who confirm their epiphanies regularly on talk shows and their op-eds. The only population segments remaining that refuse to accept the evident reality are local leftwing loonies scattered around the country. Their alt-left message is still that the country is overwhelmingly in support of liberal cum socialist policies, and that only isolated pockets of ignorant, old, and out-of-touch rightwingers hold on to the notion that our country is deeply divided. And in these backwoods, those (of us) who are anti-collectivist and point out that the Left does not speak for all Americans, we are accused of everything from being stupid to treasonous.

Now that cry of treason has been elevated to the highest levels in Washington where there has been a concerted witch hunt going on to hang that label on the conduct of our duly elected president and his team who are accused of stealing the 2016 election with Russia’s aid. That there is no evidence to support this makes no never mind to the disciples of Alinsky. They live and thrive on the votes of the half that pays no attention or has no ability to do so.

The post-SOTUS chasm that divides us has gotten noticeably wider.

[3feb18 update] Admittedly President Trump took a victory lap about the economy during his SCOTUS. The Dems were quick to respond that he was taking credit for the residual tailwind still blowing from Obama's brilliant performance with our economy (you recall, that's the one that saw the slowest recovery from a recession since WW2). Well here's a little stat that was reported tonight on the results of the latest WSJ/NBC poll - 57% of Democrats (gasp!) approve of President Trump's handling of the economy. In his eight years at the helm, Obama never achieved such a high atta boy. When prepping for the 2018 elections, this should make Chuckie and Nancy change out their Depends.

31 January 2018

The company that pits its labor against another’s use of technology loses. The worker who pits his labor against technology loses. – The John Henry Law & Corollary

George Rebane

[This is the linked transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 31 January 2018.]

Let’s take a break from the political goings on in Washington and Sacramento, and consider something that will really change our lives in the not too distant future. In previous commentaries we have visited the approaching Singularity, when machines, the so-called AIs, surpass human intelligence. (more here, here, and here) Many people already are aware that we live in the pre-Singularity years as we hear daily reports of smart machines and robots displacing humans in another area of expertise or somewhere new in the workplace.

It wasn’t that long ago when even well-read people still used the ‘never’ word – ‘machines will never be able to do this, or they’ll never best humans doing that.’ Well, today we are already on a slippery slope, and witness machines beating the best humans in the most sophisticated games, outperforming the most knowledgeable humans in more and more areas of medicine (such as diagnostics, prescribing treatments, and even in delicate surgical procedures); machines are already world-class masters in finance and manufacturing. And autonomous vehicles are taking to the highways, our airspace, and distant battlefields.

The old shibboleth that new technologies will always create more jobs than they destroy has given us hope since John Henry the Steel Driving Man of the 19th century (here and here), but sadly that no longer holds true. Today human employment has become more selective than ever, and our current high employment rate is maintained almost entirely by low participation in the workforce, and an expanding economy which itself is driven by increased uses of advanced technologies.

What work humans will do in the next decade or two is anyone’s guess, but you can bet the farm that we all will be competing with tireless, strong, extremely agile, very smart, and much less expensive workers with silicon brains. And talk about income inequality – you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

As an example, let’s turn to a pursuit that almost all of us still think will forever be reserved for humans - making music. Specifically, composing, producing, and performing it. Before you write off silicon artists, both unembodied and humanoid, consider how second-best performances already fare in the entertainment and sports markets. Why do women’s athletics have such a hard time competing with the men for media audiences? Who today would be interested in following a man vs machine match in which the machine is the guaranteed winner? And who would even watch a human vs human contest where it is known that they are second rate competitors – an intelligent machine has and would again beat either of them. In short, consider that we might soon attend human-only competitions with the compassion that today motivates us to watch the Special Olympics or foot races for amputees.

Now imagine watching a perfectly fashioned, fully conversant, pre-sentient android virtuoso violinist or pianist play a difficult classical concerto or some newly composed music that no human could master. How would we accept such artistry with the knowledge that even the best human virtuoso is not up to the art of the possible? And beyond that beckon conceivable musics in new audio formats that can only be synthesized by machines, conceived by other machines which have learned to compose aural presentations that are siren-like to the human auditory system, and therefore overwhelmingly pleasing above the consumption of all other previously offered recreational sounds.

In such a fast approaching world, what then will we humans do to challenge, amuse, and entertain ourselves - in short, what shall we do to maintain a purposeful existence? Today we already see some answers to what people will do when they see themselves as without hope and irrelevant to the established social order. For the rest of us, our best defense and greatest comfort against such far out notions come from simply ignoring the possibilities, or holding fast to the belief that it will never happen. But wait a minute, there’s that ‘never’ word again.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.

28 January 2018

Rep Devin Nunes, chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote a memo that summarized what the committee has discovered about the shady doings of the FBI and the DoJ regarding their investigation of all matters Trump during 2016, and now extending into President Trump’s 2017 year in office.

The national Left, led by its Congressional electeds, has gone apoplectic about Nunes’ intent to release the memo so everyone can see what’s been going on in these ‘non-partisan’ investigations. That, according to every Democrat you ask, is the last thing that their party wants the American people to see. Led by the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep Adam Schiff, the memo is characterized as “profoundly misleading”, “political”, and “distorted”, and also too hot for us everyday folks to handle. Why? (Seatbelts please) Because part of its basis is classified or restricted, and therefore not available to the rest of us.

20 January 2018

Two of my favorite cartoonists – one from either side of the aisle – have made recent contributions worth noting. Ramirez makes an excellent statement about America, with its porous borders, exposing itself to all kinds of ongoing socio-economic insults. (H/T to reader)

But today’s (20jan18) offering by our own RL Crabb in The Union is of most interest. He correctly discerns that in recent years it has been that “those who wear a star will decide who will wear the stripes.” It wasn’t supposed to be that way according to our Constitution. But in recent years the star-clad enforcers of the various fed agencies (and they all have them, some with military gear) have been the posse/jury/judge/turnkey one-stop shop to put you behind bars. This new role for law enforcement was brought to a pinnacle by former FBI Director Comey exonerating Hillary from an entire list of obvious crimes.

Now I’m not sure if Bob’s cartoon above is an epiphany, or a tongue-in-cheek revelation of a longheld understanding, or was he even aware of the profundity that his little bearded one uttered.

17 January 2018

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 17 January 2018. A slightly edited version of the broadcast commentary appears here in the 20jan18 Union.]

We are now such a tragically polarized nation that almost all of us believe we are being misled through the various media. We believe that disinformation and ‘fake news’ make up the major fare we are exposed to, and its source is, of course, from the other side. Observing this growing socio-political crisis over the recent years, the well-respected and non-partisan Rand Corporation has launched a research program to discover the nature, extent, causes, and possible solutions to what it calls ‘Truth Decay’. They recently published a report, actually a 326-page book, that describes the problem along with an outline for future research.

The Rand authors, Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael Rich, start by giving a working definition of Truth Decay. Its four dominant trends are –

1. increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data;

2. a blurring of the line between opinion and fact;

3. the increasing relative volume, and resulting influence, of opinion and personal experience over fact;

13 January 2018

Ms Nancy Eubanks is one of Nevada County’s prominent progressive voices whose litanies appear regularly in the local press. In this morning’s (13jan18) Union she assumes her mantel of high dudgeon against the greedy rich, and again champions class warfare and the politics of unrequited envy (here). Today’s sermon from her mount is a devious diatribe on the impact of the new tax law designed to convince the ignorant that this legislation once more allows the rich to rob the poor.

Her punchline is that “… the top 0.1 percent will now get a tax cut of $179,000. The average person making between $25,000 and $48,000 will get a temporary tax cut of $310.” This is raw meat for the unread and the innumerates. The Tax Foundation tallies the relevant data (here). It turns out that her quoted range neatly straddles the bottom 50% of taxpayers who pay 2.75% of all income taxes, while the top 1% (not 0.1%) pay almost 40% of all income taxes on slightly more than 20% of all earnings, and way more than all of the top 90% of taxpayers. And those in her quoted earnings range are overwhelmingly among the 44% of American who pay no federal individual income taxes (here), which explains why the remainder pay only 2.75% of the total federal income taxes collected.

And Dame Nancy again repeats the socialists’ favorite fiscal shibboleth – tax rates do not impact economic growth, and its most favored version “there is no correlation between tax cuts for the rich and job and wage growth.” To her and hers it still appears that the rich just continue to shove their added incomes into mattresses and Cayman Island banks. The last thing they do is consume, invest, and start/grow companies, all of which create and maintain America’s jobs.

12 January 2018

No matter what he actually said in that White House meeting on immigration policy, President Trump has again focused a policy discussion on a crux of the matter instead of continuing the same ol’ same ol’ circling of the barn. I don’t want to debate whether he actually said “shithole country” as the press is attributing, but I hope he did if it gets us off the dime in deciding who should be let in to serve America’s interests as a sovereign and sustainable nation-state.

Because this is a family-oriented blog (hah!), and in the ensuing discussion we will want to continue using that colorful descriptor without gratuitously sprinkling dirty words all over these pages, I will use the three-letter acronym SHC in the sequel for both expedience and, perhaps, collateral decorum. Nevertheless, the meaning of that appellation will be made and should remain clear.

Instead of working on a more polished commentary, I decided to quickly anchor my contribution to the topic in a structured list of propositions that I believe are also embraced more or less by other conservetarians. If they are also Bayesians like me, then their beliefs of the following will range from near zero (impossible) to near unity (certain), and in the process never saying never for either extreme.

04 January 2018

The 2018 Tax Reform Act is legislation that I believe will overall reduce taxes for almost all Americans, and with its business-friendly provisions will give a significant boost to GDP growth. However, its SALT (state and local taxes) provision disturbs me because it is intrinsically flawed both functionally and, yes, ethically. The latter because it allows the various taxing jurisdictions to make the wage earner pay more in taxes than the total amount he earned. SALT bases its tax amounts on the total amount earned before any other mandated taxes, fees, and tributes are paid. If all taxing jurisdictions practice SALT – say local rate is 25%, state rate is 35%, federal rate is 45% - then the taxpayer may wind up owing more than a 100% of his earnings in taxes. Such policies are intrinsically unfair and unethical. The jurisdictions should decide their sequence of taxation – say, first local then state then federal – and each apply their rates to the amount that the taxpayer has left after paying his prior tax obligations. That way the total taxes may approach 100%, but they will never exceed it like in the above example where the taxes sum to 105% of earnings.

America’s Left either does not understand the use of force by nations, or is consciously working to have our country capitulate to or be destroyed by a foreign power. As outlined most recently in ‘America’s Checkpoints’, I believe in the former. It is unconscionable that Democrats like Schumer and Pelosi will hold defense upgrades hostage to their vote buying spending programs. Without a formidable military feared by our enemies, diplomacy sings castrato. In short, without credible arms there will be no United States to earn the redistributed monies for our entitlement programs. And the Left knows this as it plays brinkmanship with what should be a non-partisan funding priority were we truly all Americans. Mark Helprin of the Claremont Institute lays out the details of the current dire situation in his ‘America’s Alarmingly Archaic Arsenal’.

And jumping from perfidy to insanity, the Left’s class warfare and identity politics cadres have come up with a new one for the campus wars, soon to be seen on a lamestream commentary near you. The core contention in understanding the new black-white dialogue on campuses is, “One, that civility, as currently practiced in America, is a white construct. Two, that in a campus setting, the “woke” white student’s endeavor to avoid microaggressions against black peers is itself a microaggression—a form of noblesse oblige whereby white students are in fact patronizing students of color. Not only that, but by treating black students with common courtesy and expecting the same in return, white students elide black grievances, bypassing the “race talk” that is supposed to occur in preamble to all other conversations. Got it?”

And it gets worse in the context of reasoned debates in which reason is now considered racist. So, “increasingly at major competitions, there must be a pre-debate debate on the terms of engagement: whether students are required to cite proof or are free to argue wholly from their feelings and so-called lived experience. Far from being banned or even maligned by debate judges, such antics increasingly win converts and, not coincidentally, matches.” And there is no requirement that your “lived experience” bears any resemblance to the real world. “Students are pointedly discouraged from rebutting feelings that don’t jibe with verifiable reality.” (more here)

03 January 2018

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 3 January 2018.]

Before we get into the more serious part of the commentary, I want to wish all KVMR listeners a healthy and prosperous 2018. We all know it will be another extraordinary year no matter what your political outlook and hopes.

Last Sunday, New Year’s Eve, Jo Ann and I were preparing for a quiet and intimate evening with friends to enjoy a dinner in front of the fireplace, listen to some laid-back jazz, and play our favorite game of cards while keeping an eye on the happenings in Time Square with the TV on mute. The Christmas decorations were still up, and the décor extended the festive mood from what turned out to be an entire month of holiday celebrations at our house. And then I was suddenly reminded of what we saw on the news before our guests arrived.

The afternoon’s major coverage was about how secure the New Year’s celebrations were going to be across the country, starting of course with Times Square. There we were shown long lines of would be revelers all lined up at checkpoints manned by police and other serious looking people with submachine guns at the ready, keeping their trained eyes on our east coast neighbors waiting to be allowed in and start celebrating. We were assured by the newscaster and various officials that there would be, not one, but two cordons of security checkpoints that everyone would have go through before being granted ‘admission’ to one of the most public, open, and historically accessible spaces in the nation. These scenes brought back many memories and a moist eye, because I was looking at what my country had become in a few short years.

Was interested to see the nearby full-page ad in the 3jan18 WSJ. Given that ignorance, indifference, ideology, illiteracy, … are all qualities that often decorate and distinguish their ‘factual, fair, and balanced’ work products, RR has long viewed the journalism profession with a gimlet eye (here). But now things have apparently gotten so bad that international associations for journalists openly admit that “reporters worldwide” have come to report “falsehoods”, perhaps even unwittingly, for which now organizations such as the International Center for Journalists go to great pains to advertise their ability to “empower” workers in the field to “produce reliable coverage using new technologies and best practices(sic).” Well, then what kind of unreliable coverage have journalists been producing using their old technologies and sub-par practices?

In any case, this appears to be a step in the right direction when the industry begins to publicly admit that it has not been performing up to snuff while wallowing in the rising tide of fake news and “falsehoods”, much of it auto-generated to promote agendas and sustain favored ideological narratives. The ICFJ website is worth visiting. While their mission statement is commendable, methinks their orientation is not as innocent as they would have you believe. Mostly, I wonder what are their methods of ‘empowerment’. But since they are also funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, they can’t be all bad, can they?

29 December 2017

Rural towns and big cities divide in their populations and prosperity. While bigger cities have become more prosperous, smaller towns and rural communities have suffered. The reasons are many and well summarized in an article by Paul Overberg that presents the relevant data in good graphical formats. The piece begins with –

About 1 in 7 Americans lives in rural parts of the country—1,800 counties that sit outside any metropolitan area. A generation ago, most of these places had working economies, a strong social fabric and a way of life that drew a steady stream of urban migrants. Today, many are in crisis. Populations are aging, more working-age adults collect disability, and trends in teen pregnancy and divorce are diverging for the worse from metro areas. Deaths by suicide and in maternity are on the rise.

In our little county we suffer from most of the factors presented. Unfortunately, these are data unknown to our progressive neighbors whose limited readings inform them that our problems are caused by our aging conservative population, the elimination of which will enable our return to happier days.

America has been the victim of public education’s and the media’s politically revised history for some two generations now. We have covered and debated many of these deficits within RR’s commentaries and comment streams, which present recorded evidence of how the Left’s revisionist history impacts public outlook, understanding, and mood. The beat goes on in two current movies – ‘The Crown’ and ‘The Post’. Peggy Noonan argues convincingly (here) that “we often write of the urgent need for more truth in politics. A hope for 2018 is more truth in art and entertainment, too.” This is doubly important for our tens of millions of lightly-read voters who get what little sense of history they have from the entertainment media. A damning example presented by Noonan is in Spielberg’s ‘Post’ that portrays President Nixon as the villain in the Pentagon Papers story, the subject of the movie. The bald historical fact totally destroyed by the film is that the Pentagon Papers documented the horrific lies told the American people by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, which all occurred before Nixon’s presidency and the papers make no mention of that administration. The poor schlemiels watching this movie have no clue that JFK and Johnson started and disastrously prosecuted the Vietnam War, and that Nixon ended it.

Speaking of presidential lies. More of the lightly-read are all worked up on ‘Trump’s lies’ as if these have achieved some historical pinnacle in presidential perfidy. Again, the facts of the matter are quite different when the archives are consulted instead of misconstrued. Comparing Trump’s malaprops to what continuously came out of the mouths of his Democratic predecessors, makes a joke out of present day accusations. I mean, presidents like JFK, Johnson, Clinton, and Obama told lies that resulted in deaths by the tens of thousands and/or changed the course of nations, starting with America. In that category of competition Trump’s a piker.

How come they let so many obviously stupid people pass the bar? (... and then elect them?) The latest example is NY’s Governor Cuomo. This law school graduate cum legal twit actually believes that the new tax law’s SALT provisions are unconstitutional, apparently having no idea what the constitution says about taxation and the states’ rights concerning such levies. Making such ignorant and outlandish public statements for a public figure is the equivalent of an engineer submitting a design for a bridge that violates basic physics such as the sums of vector forces and moments must equal zero (i.e. balance) at all points in the structure. If an engineer failed at that, he would find himself on the street with very poor prospects for another engineering job. Clearly, some professions – e.g. in the law and journalism - are considerably more fault tolerant of their practitioners.

Civil service reform is fundamental to draining The Swamp. By my reckoning and experience for every useful and functional civil servant, we support at least four or five who are in various forms incompetent, ignorant, stupid, spiteful, petty, crooked, terminally socialist, … . The poster-children IRS and the EPA are but two of countless government agencies, big and small, that provide employment of last resort for about two million of the nation’s otherwise unemployables. (Paying them the same wages for just staying home would be of untold benefit to the country.) Some of the hopeful across the land believe that reforming this Deep State branch of government might be a candidate for bipartisan effort for 2018. I don’t see the logic in that argument, since the Dems are totally invested in such a system to not only provide a reliable voting block, but also enforce socialist policies that may or not be supported in law or the constitution. (more here)

[30dec17 update] NPR’s daily Trump trashing focused on his NYT interview wherein he pointed out that there is no “evidence” of any “Russia collusion”. For the reporters that was enough to prove the existence of conspiratorial collusion, the evidence for which is surely forthcoming. IMHO special prosecutors should and do reveal indictable evidence when it is confirmed. Such announcements need not stop further investigation, but they do put the accused on notice so that they can begin their defense in a timely manner. But then again, we should do that only if we still believe that the accused is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, no longer a given under current American jurisprudence, especially as practiced in the media.

Vaunted money managers and financial analysts blew it again for 2017. Still have no idea why these birds are ever taken seriously. Last January their consensus was that 2017 would be a ho-hum year with markets mostly moving sideways. Turns out that the security markets, home and abroad, had a banner year. Yet smart money will be on everyone in the media sticking a mike into the faces of their favorite financial prognosticators to get another load of manure on the markets. Who says modern cultures are too sophisticated to believe in witch doctors and shamans? For these to be believed today, all they need do is wear a suit and keep a straight face.

Our hyper-progressive friends(actually our kids’ friends) sent out the annual summary of their ideological accomplishments for the past year. They are a well-to-do professional couple ensconced on the beach in one California’s tony coastal communities. Both are employed by large multi-nationals for which one of them is the exec in charge of environmental compliance (what else?). Their moral equivalent (superior?) of a Christmas card details the politically correct list of activist activities, marches, protests, concerned consumption, … in which they and their now adult offspring participated, at times travelling internationally to take part, all for the unquestioned benefit of Earth and its human interlopers. The copy and included pictures are a prideful mix of a political leaflet and a self-adulation celebrating their unabashed largess derived from the hidden engine of crass capitalism which is the mortal enemy of every public policy they celebrate and promote.